Tag Archives: Catalan

November 21, 2011 · 2:47 pm

Words and the Man

I have been thinking a great deal about words this past weekend, gentle reader, for it seems as though I am overwhelmed by them at the moment. Not only do I have a lot of writing to do at my work before Thanksgiving, and indeed over the next several weeks before I go on holiday for Christmas, but in addition to my daily blogging I am also composing an article of rather substantial length for another site. Then there is the fact that my inbox over the past several weeks has become a complete shambles of unanswered mail. And on top of that as a Catholic, I am aware of the significant change in words that is about to occur within the central liturgical celebration of my faith, in that I will have to learn and become accustomed to a whole new translation of the mass. It seems of late as though words are not escaping me, but rather that I am completely surrounded by them.

In follow-up to my post on Friday, we had a beautiful day of it for the celebration at my parish of St. Stephen Martyr yesterday of both the 50th anniversary of our present church building, and for the dedication of our new vestibule and new doors depicting scenes from the life of St. Stephen. Although I was sorry that Cardinal Wuerl could not make it, having been called to Rome for some last-minute meetings, we were fortunate to have Auxiliary Bishop Barry Knestout presiding. Bishop Knestout has a background in architecture, and oversaw the contest among the architecture students at Catholic University to design the Papal Mass furniture for when Pope Benedict XVI visited Washington a couple of years ago. It was unusual to have a homily in the context of which the preacher explained some of the differences between Romanesque, High Gothic, Baroque, and Modernist architecture, pointing out the good points of each and how each might bring us to reflect on our relationship with God in different ways.

It struck me as we went through the liturgy that, since I am not usually able to attend daily mass, this would be the last time I would attend a mass using the English-language translation of the Order of Mass that I have known my whole life. For those of my readers who are not Catholics, beginning this coming Sunday Catholics in the U.S. will be using a new translation of the mass from the official Latin into English, replacing a translation that had been put in place decades ago but which was not quite as faithful to the original Latin text. Over the past few months we have been introduced, slowly, to the coming changes, but the full implementation of them will begin with the First Sunday of Advent this weekend.

As a cradle Catholic born in the 1970′s, who attended a pretty solid, middle-of-the-road parish growing up, I was completely unfamiliar with the mass in Latin until I was about 17 years old, when I attended a Latin-language mass for the first time. It is something which ought to be made more widely available in our parishes, as the Pope has asked bishops to do, but having said that I am quite comfortable attending most Sundays in my own language. If we did have a wider availability of mass in Latin in this Archdiocese, for example, I expect that I would want to have it for some of the important feast days and holy days, rather than every Sunday; but that is just my opinion or preference, of course.

When I am in Barcelona, as I will be in a few weeks’ time, I have a small booklet containing the Order of Mass with the Castilian (Spanish) text on one side, and the Catalan text on the other. It is always striking to compare the two, for there are more words of clearly Arabic origin in the Castilian text, thanks to the conquest of Spain by the Moors in 711 A.D., and Catalonia being kept free from Muslim occupation by Charlemagne and subsequent Frankish kings after a fairly short interval of Moorish control. In addition, even when both languages have a word of clearly Latin origin, they are of different vintage.

For example if we look at the text of the Consecration in English, quoting Christ at the Last Supper, the text currently reads, “Take this all of you and eat it, for this is my body, which shall be given up for you.” If we look at the same text in Catalan, it reads:

“Preneu i mengeu‑ne tots, que això és el meu cos, entregat per vosaltres.”

Whereas in Castilian, the same text reads:

“Tomad y comed todos de él, porque esto es mi cuerpo, que será entregado por vosotros.”

Note that the root verbs “manger” (Catalan) and “comer” (Castilian) are of Latin origin, both meaning “to eat”, but whereas the Catalan word obviously comes from the same Latin root as that which gave rise to the French verb “manger”, which is of course the same as in Catalan, and the Italian verb “mangiare”, which is quite similar, the Castilian word is from a different branching of Latin dialect.

In a way, this is all just interesting side material, of course.  Yet the understanding of what is actually being said at the mass is of deep importance, I believe, to the individual soul. How we see our relationship with God, and our duty to our fellow man, stems in large part from the words that we hear when we are in His Presence, and which we take away with us as we go about our business.  It is true that in my day-to-day life, when at the office, blogging, or engaging in new media, sometimes it becomes very tiring to concentrate on words all of the time, and yet other words come back to remind me to do the best that I can.

With the implementation of the new translation of the mass, I will have no choice BUT to concentrate on what is being said, for so much of it will be new, or a subtle variation on what I have always known for the past three decades.  I am looking forward to paying attention to these particular words, with the hope that I will be internalizing their significance in the process. For the words that I write or speak, whether on these virtual pages or elsewhere, are ultimately of no import unless the words of the mass, the central celebration around which my life turns, touch my heart and my mind, and stir me to take action.


Detail of Christ on main entrance facade,
St. Stephen Martyr, Washington, D.C.

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September 15, 2011 · 4:01 pm

Barcelona’s Forgotten Master

The CaixaForum in Barcelona has just opened a retrospective on the life and work of an often-forgotten 20th century Catalan architect, Enric Sagnier i Villavecchia (1858-1931), which will run through early January. Sagnier is a man who, at this point, is almost certainly not as familiar to students of architecture as the famous triumvirate of early 20th century Catalan architects, Gaudí, Domènech i Montaner, and Puig i Cadafalch, men who set such an obvious stamp on the city of Barcelona. And yet, the lives of visitors to and residents of Barcelona are both surrounded and shaped by his work, likely without their even knowing it.

Those who have had occasion to visit my ongoing cataloging project over at CatholicBarcelona.com will find Sagnier’s name a familiar one. At the turn of the 20th century he was unquestionably the preferred architect of the Archdiocese when it came to building new ecclesiastical structures, such as parish churches, schools, and institutions. Among his many buildings in this general category are the parish churches of Mary, Help of Christians (1889) St. John in Horta (1905), the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on Mt. Tibidabo (1902), Our Lady of Pompeii (1905), the Basilica of St. Joseph Oriol(1911),  Our Lady of the Rosary (1923), and St. Raymond Nonat (1924).

However, in addition to his work in this area, Sagnier also designed secular buildings of particular significance to the life of the city. Among other structures Sagnier co-designed the Palace of Justice (1886), which houses the city’s law courts, the Customs House (1896) of the city port, the original Royal Yacht Club (1911) which was, sadly, later demolished and replaced by a glass box, and numerous large apartment buildings, banks, and offices, which still dominate many of the main thoroughfares of downtown Barcelona.

Sagnier was on many occasions given both the luxury and the challenge of having to work with a building which would be sited on a prominent corner – a task which is not as easy as one might think. Because a structure which includes a corner is naturally going to have more exposure than one which sits in the middle of a block, the architect has various ways in which he can address the urban geography. He can ignore the corner entirely, choosing to front the building on one or another street; he can embrace the corner, by having it serve as the fulcrum to his design; or he can try to come up with some way to both acknowledge the corner but not make it the center of his plans.

Take for example, Sagnier’s monumental Caixa de Pensions (1914) savings bank, which sits on a rather awkward corner of the Via Laietana. This avenue was cut through the old city in the early 20th century, separating the Gothic Quarter from La Ribera and the Borne district, and whose construction involved the regrettable demolition of a number of historic structures. Toward the top of the avenue, where the Av. Bilbao juts off, there is an oddly shaped, but prominent corner, which Sagnier was commissioned to fill.

The resulting building, a mixture of Gothic, Romanesque, and Slavic architecture, among other things, exhibits the asymmetry which was characteristic of the Art Nouveau period, but which in this case was designed to address the particular problem of the site. The prominent clock tower on the SW corner faces the little square formed by the branching off of Av. Bilbao from the Via Laietana, which gets far more light and traffic than the opposite, SE corner, which has a much smaller, slimmer tower. Had the two towers been of equal proportions, the resulting building would have looked, paradoxically, to be out of balance in relation to the site.

Similarly, because the SW tower is about three times the width and height of the SE tower, Sagnier chose to locate the entrance to the building not through the center of the facade, but rather through the SW tower itself, via two archways set into the base of the tower. Although again, this lends an asymmetrical aspect to the building, it also allows the structure to take full advantage of the site. Rather than presenting a single facade to the south side of the intersection, it allows the facade to wrap around the sides of the building, drawing in those who are coming to do business there to approach it from multiple sides, while at the same time making very clear where the main entrance is.

Having said this, while he has some flashes of brilliance in his work, Sagnier is not an architect who strikes me as particularly impressive in his output. He is not as innovative in his interpretation of historical architectural styles, fusing these influences to create something entirely new, as did his better-known contemporaries. Nor is he what we might loosely call a “classical” architect, remaining true to certain established principles of design irrespective of trends or fashion, in order to produce something timelessly beautiful. His work is sometimes a bit fussy and contrived, almost as though he opened up an architectural salvage catalogue and threw together various disconnected elements, but without that spark of genius that characterized Catalan architecture at the turn of the previous century.

He was, however, a man who clearly cared deeply about his home town and about the Christian faith, producing structures which, in their grandeur if not always in their execution, were worthy of any of the great cities of the world. A re-assessment of his work was long overdue, and it is a very good thing that both the citizens of and visitors to Barcelona will become more familiar with his long career and extensive output. I am definitely looking forward to catching this exhibition when I am in Barcelona this Christmas.


Enric Sagnier i Villavecchia

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July 22, 2011 · 3:08 pm

Whining About Wine: Your Feedback Matters

Gentle reader, I must warn you that I am about to whine about wine – and not because I intend to go on and on about how some wine tastes like blossoming toe cheese with a hint of lavender.  While reading an article about wines from Spain yesterday, I became increasingly annoyed with the errors spread throughout the piece, and I asked myself, aloud, “Who allowed this to go to print?” The example it provides should bring home to all of us the importance of checking with more than one source before we write something, yes, but also to the point that even the best writers need good editors.  And when writing and editing does not come up to snuff, your feedback as a reader matters deeply to me personally, as well as to bloggers and reporters in general.

This is not to say that I believe there was any malice on the part of the writer in the article linked to above. To the contrary: I am quite sure the author meant well in writing his piece. On top of which, any time someone draws attention to the food and wine of Catalonia, where the maternal half of my family hails from, I am naturally very pleased.

However when an article begins like this, I smell trouble:

What do Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina and Portugal all have in common? At one time or another, each of these wine-producing countries was considered the little darling of wine values. There’s now a new country in town — Spain. While there is nothing new about Spain producing wine, it is now gaining a reputation on the world wine stage as making very good wines at very reasonable prices.

The author is right that there is nothing new about Spain producing wine. However to state that Spain “is now gaining” fame for making reasonably-priced wine, as if this was a new phenomenon, is incorrect. Perhaps if this article had been written twenty years ago, that sense of up-and-coming might have been the case. However, Spain has been well-known for many years now in this country and elsewhere as producing good, reasonably-priced wines – indeed, it was known for this long before several of the countries in the list provided by the author were known as being able to produce the same.

The writer then goes on to recommend a particular label of sparkling wine by producers Juve y Camps, stating that this product “from the Cava region should definitely be on your list.” Unfortunately, there is no “Cava” region in Catalonia, where the wine in question is produced. “Cava” is simply the Catalan word for “cave”, which is where Catalan sparkling wines are traditionally matured.

Most Catalan sparkling wines hail from the area around the town of Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, in the Alt Penedès wine region of Catalonia. Penedès is second only perhaps to the Rioja region, in terms of the sales volume of Iberian-made wines. And as it happens, a reading of the Juve y Camps label in question reveals that, yes, it is from Sant Sadurní.

“One does not often hear about wines from the Coast Brava section of Spain,” the author goes on to state, before describing another Catalan wine. This is probably because the section in question is known as the “Costa Brava”, meaning the “Wild Coast”, and not the “Coast Brava”, which sounds like a new brand of deodorant soap. Starting out a sentence with either a semi-translation or a sloppy editing job is really not the way to inspire confidence in print, whatever follows.

The reviewer goes on to explain that the wine label “Turo Negre is Catalonian for the ‘black hill’.” While it is a debatable point, the word “Catalonian” is a word which is increasingly falling out of favor, both in journalism and publishing, in favor of the word “Catalan”. That aside, as a general rule “Catalan”, rather than “Catalonian”, is used to describe the language of the people of Catalonia.

The point of all this nit-picking is not to malign the intent of the author, who clearly enjoys what he does and wants to share what he has learned with others: would that we all might have such an enjoyable project on which to work. Rather, it is to point out that you cannot believe everything that you read, not only in politics, but also when it comes to product reviews. Even great movie, automobile, and wine reviewers can make mistakes, and it sometimes falls to an editor to catch those mistakes.

However in turning the mirror on oneself, the truth is that those of us who blog can be guilty of the same types of errors as those listed in the preceding paragraphs. Bloggers often work as the sole researchers, writers and editors of the pieces they publish.  As self-contained units, the likelihood of committing errors in reporting or analysis can be just as great, if not greater, than those who write for a newspaper, magazine, or group publication employing professional staff to help with such matters.

If you care about the accuracy of what you write, and I certainly do, then the receipt of feedback to correct an obvious error in a blog post is never viewed as an affront.  Disagreeing with my opinions is one thing, but I would rather be told, “You got the date wrong,” or “You forgot this important point,” on a post I have written, than be allowed to go my merry way in ignorance.  Feedback that seeks to correct an error is only whining if there is nothing constructive to be gained from correcting the error in the first place.

One of the cellars of the Codorníu winery,
Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, Catalonia

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